Avant-garde author and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, perhaps known best for his Academy Award-nominated screenplay for the 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad, died Monday. He was part of a group that came to be known as the New Novelists, which, as yesterday’s New York Times obituary pointed out, eschewed “literary conventions like plot and character development, narrative and chronology, chapters and punctuation.” While that may be true, I’ve still managed to find wisdom in his essays contained in For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, which offer good advice far more clear-headed and down to Earth than that previous description would indicate.

In the 1957 essay titled “On Several Obsolete Notions,” he had this to say about the novel:

It is not enough that it be entertaining, or extraordinary, or enthralling; to have its measure of human truth, it must also succeed in convincing the reader that the adventures he is hearing about have really happened to real characters, and that the novelist is confining himself to reporting, to transmitting events of which he has been the witness. A tacit conversation is established between the reader and author: the latter will pretend to believe in what he is telling, the former will forget that everything is invented and will pretend to be dealing with a document, a biography, a real-life story. To tell a story well is therefore to make what one writes resemble the unprefabricated schemas people are used to, in other words, their ready-made idea of reality.

Thus, whatever the unexpected nature of the situations, the accidents, the fortuitous reactions, the narrative must flow without jolts, as though of its own accord, with the irrepressible élan which immediately wins our adherence. The least hesitation, the slightest oddity (two contradictory elements, for example, or two that do not exactly match), and unexpectedly the current of the novel ceases to sustain the reader, who suddenly wonders if he is not being “told a story” and who threatens to return to authentic testimonies, about which at least he will not have to ask himself questions as to verisimilitude of things. Even more than to divert, the issue here is to reassure him.

I think this aim is the same whether a story is set in the here and now, or on the other side of the galaxy. The quest for that perfect truth remains.